How TechSmith is Using UserIQ’s Event Notifications to Make Their Customer Success Team More Proactive

Event notifications, through UserIQ’s new Slack integration, allow companies to set up alerts that let them know when specific events, like a drop in usage or a new NPS survey response, have occurred. This new feature will be available for all of our customers in the coming weeks.

UserIQ: Tell us a little about your customer success team at TechSmith and some of the challenges you were facing that led you to seek out a solution like UserIQ?

Megan: The concept of customer success is relatively new to TechSmith. With the launch of our first subscription-based cloud offering the 2014 (TechSmith Relay), we realized the importance of having someone who would work with the customer post-sale to ensure a successful onboarding experience, build a strong relationship with the customer, help increase adoption of the product throughout the organization, and help secure the subscription renewal year after year. As such, I became the first Customer Success Manager at TechSmith. With very little knowledge or understanding of what customer success was, I spent much of my first two years learning through trial and error. Within the past year, my team of one expanded to three. Today our team consists of one Customer Success Manager to oversee the relationship with the customer, a Learning and Development Specialist to assist with user onboarding and trainings, and a Customer Growth Specialist to assist with the creation of tutorial and support content.

While we have come a long way since 2014, we realized we were still operating in a very reactive manner. While we had some customer usage data available to us, it required us to manually login to each customer’s site to access it. Additionally, because we use multiple systems to collect and store customer information (Salesforce, Zendesk, Google Analytics, App Insights, etc.), it was nearly impossible to get an accurate picture of a customer’s overall health. We found the majority of our time was spent either manually pulling data from all of our systems to try and track customer growth, or fielding incoming customer emails and support tickets. Furthermore, with a lack of visibility into how/if our customers were using our software, we were often blindsided by customer issues and, in some cases, were too late to save them and secure their renewal for the next subscription term.

In search of a solution, I began researching how other companies approached customer success. My team and I attended various conferences, read a wide variety of books and articles and connected with other professionals in the field. Through my research, I stumbled upon the UserIQ blog and an article titled, ‘The Impact of Customer Success Throughout the Customer Journey’. This was our first introduction to UserIQ. While I had heard of Customer Success Management platforms before, I hadn’t given much thought to implementing one. After subscribing to UserIQ’s blog and researching their offering, my interest was piqued. It spoke to a lot of our pain points and I wondered if their offering could be the key to solving many of our issues. We signed up for a demo of the product and were blown away by what it could do both behind the scenes and as far as in-app engagements go. We researched several other Customer Success Management platforms but constantly found ourselves coming back to UserIQ.

UserIQ: Can you give us a few examples of how you plan to use event notifications at TechSmith and what business need it’s solving?

Historically, we’ve had to be very reactive with our customers as opposed to proactive. Meaning, we often don’t know anything is wrong until a customer reaches out to us. We have spent a lot of time ‘firefighting’ and reacting to customer issues, as well as making assumptions as to how customers are using our software. We’re hoping the use of proactive event notifications from UserIQ will make us aware of potential issues customers are facing early on so that we can intervene immediately as opposed to being blindsided by said issues when it may be too late.

UserIQ: How do you imagine your team making the most of this feature, how will this affect their daily routines?

I would imagine checking the notifications from UserIQ would become part of my team’s daily routine. This would be something we would do first thing in the morning so that we could get the appropriate people involved and address any issues immediately. The alerts would also help our team to prioritize daily tasks and be efficient in how we’re spending our time and efforts.

UserIQ: Do you have any types of customer notifications in place now? What issues are caused by not having notifications in place?

Currently we do not have any type of automated alert system in place, outside of a customer reaching out to us via email or through our technical support system. By not having notifications in place we lack visibility into what issues our customers may be facing, as well as how they’re using the software. Prior to implementing UserIQ, gathering any sort of data regarding customer utilization of our software requires us to manually check multiple systems or make internal requests from developers to run reports for us because we do not have access to the appropriate tools. It is a very time consuming and inefficient process. Often times, even when we’re able to get data it’s too late or becomes out of date immediately. The lack of alerts prevents us from being proactive with our customer outreach and instead forces us to spend the majority of our time working only with the customers who are constantly reaching out to us.

UserIQ: What ROI are you hoping to see from implementing event notifications?

Ideally, we’re hoping to spend far less time manually digging for customer data and make our team more scalable. We want to spend more time proactively reaching out to and working with our customers. We also hope to be able to identify potential issues early on and address them before it’s too late. Ultimately, we want to improve upon the quality of services we can offer customers, strengthen our relationships with our customers, and reduce our overall churn rate.

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